An Enhanced EPC Gen2v2 RFID Authentication and Ownership Management Protocol

Abstract

Radio frequency identification is a modern technology for item identification that has widely spread over the recent years. In order to securely identify the items and transfer their ownership from one entity to another, several authentication and ownership management protocols have been proposed. One of the recent protocols is Niu et al.'s EPC Class 1 Generation 2 RFID Standard Authentication and Ownership Management protocol. This lightweight protocol is mainly based on the use of bitwise XOR and permutation operations in addition to the lightweight 16-bit Pseudo Random Number Generator. However, Bagheri et al. launched de-synchronization and secret-disclosure attacks against Niu et al.'s protocol and proved that it does not fulfill the requirements for a secure authentication and ownership management protocol. In this paper, we propose an enhancement for Niu et al.'s protocol such that it can resist the de-synchronization and secret-disclosure attacks. The enhanced protocol is based on using the bitwise conversion and Hamming Weight-based left rotation operations instead of the 16-bit Pseudo Random Number Generator and the permutation operation in order to resist the secret-disclosure attack. Moreover, the proposed protocol employs the old-ids-denial mechanism and adds extra messages to the mutual authentication and ownership delegation phases so that it can defend against the de-synchronization attack.